Carmen Sandiego: Secret of the Stolen Drums

The latest installment trades education for action, but is it any fun?

Marketing mavens earn big bucks by selling "edutainment" to schools and parents across the country. Can't get your kid to read? Just buy the latest techno-book that reads for them. When it came to geography, there was the Carmen Sandiego series. Broderbund created the criminal mastermind Carmen Sandiego to be the femme fatale of the edutainment world. Her only weakness? Educated seven year olds.

Admittedly, the series made learning fun. Since you could chase Carmen Sandiego across the globe and even throughout the cosmos, finishing each game would earn you respect on the playground and a well-rounded education. It's a relatively safe bet gamers in their early 20s remember playing at least one Carmen Sandiego game.

Enter Carmen Sandiego: The Secret of the Stolen Drums, a third-person adventure developed by A2M and published by BAM! Entertainment. The Secret of the Stolen Drums takes the chase for Carmen Sandiego into the third-dimension and discards most of what made previous Carmen games a success. The focus here seems to be action, not education.

Normally, that would be a good thing. But in the case of Carmen Sandiego, it turns out being a bad thing. The developer exchanged one type of gameplay for another. In this case, derivative platforming has taken the place of sleuthing and fact finding. By cutting out the one thing the series did well (not too mention the sole reason for its existence), A2M leaves us with little reason to spend much time hunting for the criminal mastermind.

Although at first, The Secret of the Stolen Drums promises much more. Opening the game menu assaults you with all manners of gadgets through a circular menu (think deluxe detective PDA that Dick Tracy would murder someone to own) boasts an array of tabs including: atlas, maps, GPS, transport and communications. So far so good.

During the course of the game, the communications tab fills up with emails from fellow agents. The atlas stores all the geographical information you collect along the way. The map, like most maps in other action-adventure games, shows detailed information about your current location. The transport tab records all the locations you've visited within a given region and the GPS helps you track Carmen Sandiego's movements.

In theory, all your ACME gizmos sound pretty sweet. Describe the game to someone and they'd be inclined to think it's a real Carmen Sandiego game utilizing the best in modern sleuthing equipment. Unfortunately, the actual "detective" part of the game is practically non-existent. The GPS doesn't really track anything. The atlas ends up storing useless factoids that a simple Google search could deliver. The communications system, while offering help on occasion, doesn't offering anything in terms of actual clues. And the game's general lack of difficulty makes the in-game map just as useless as the atlas.

Once stripped of the detective angle, the only real gameplay remaining in The Secret of the Stolen Drums comes through the action-adventure part. While offering some degree of entertainment, much of the action feels derivative and uninspired. Anyone who has played Beyond Good & Evil will recognize many of the same mechanics. Only here, they're not implemented nearly as well. Come to think of it, you could describe The Secret of the Stolen Drums as Beyond Good & Evil minus a few hundred layers of polish. Still, every single element from Ubisoft's gem has been incorporated.